So I was goofing around with the search engine Wolfram Alpha, and tried to get it to get me some stock market quotes – as I had read where it provides information rather than data. If you play around with the search terms, you can get it to bring up a pretty decent amount of data. Here is an example for Costco:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=NASDAQ%3ACOST&lk=1&a=ClashPrefs_*Financial.NASDAQ%3ACOST-
While the charts that this brings up are interesting, I am not sure it its giving me information to help me make decisions, or just more data. One of the charts is a projection of price, but it appears to be based solely on historical information. Costco is interesting because it just got a new CEO to replace Jim Sinegal. My view is that any time a company gets a new CEO – investors should be cautious, as change is not always good (i.e. post Bill Gates Microsoft, post Howard Schultz Starbucks). Since stock market predictions need to take into account forward looking indicators, and everybody has an opinion on what forward looking indicators to use, I dont think a search engine can or should do that (without showing its prediction accuracy). So at this point, while I think the data Wolfram Alpha gives me is somewhat interesting, I think I will have to ignore its information it provides in the form of price projections.